Mildly Skilledhttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/
Recent content on Mildly SkilledHugo -- gohugo.ioen-gbMon, 31 Jul 2017 14:15:42 +0100Mokocharlie Mobile Part 1http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/mokocharlie-mobile-part-1/
Mon, 31 Jul 2017 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/mokocharlie-mobile-part-1/After a massive break from hacking on Mokocharlie, I felt like I needed to get my mind of some other things and perhaps do something that I found to be fun on a weekend.
I have been meaning to build a ReSTful API for Moko for a while now, I experimented with PHP a long time ago. It was OK but I&rsquo;m in a different space now so I decided to go with the Akka stack, and perhaps use Slick for the data layer.Content as a Service with a Micro Frameworkhttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/caas-with-micro-framework/
Tue, 30 Jun 2015 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/caas-with-micro-framework/I had an idea of building a content management system with one of the Scala frameworks a while back and I decided on the Play Framework. In the middle of scoping things out in terms of my requirements, I decided that perhaps I did not want to build &ldquo;yet another CMS.&rdquo; My initial idea was to build something like wordpress using Play, but the more I thought about it the more I questioned what exactly I wanted to achieve.Django Bug?http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/django-bug/
Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/django-bug/After spending hours trying to debug why my settings file was not being found I stumbled across this
I&rsquo;ve found the answer to my question.
If you&rsquo;ve got an error in your settings, manage.py will swallow the exception and report as if the command does not exist. This lead me down the path of incorrectly assuming my python path or venv environment was messed up. If you want to diagnose this issue, run&hellip;Every Now and Thenhttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/every-now-and-then/
Tue, 12 Aug 2014 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/every-now-and-then/I generally don&rsquo;t spend that much time on Quora. I do get the emails but I&rsquo;m just not that interested in the questions or answers for that matter to spend that much time except this particular one.
50 rules to live your life by Life: What advice would a 70 or 80 year old person give about the way the life should be lived?
The most &lsquo;upvoted&rsquo; answer was:Building an API for Mokocharlie's Community photos 2http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/mokocharlie-photo-api-part-2/
Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/mokocharlie-photo-api-part-2/Last time out I introduced a basic idea for an API, this post will be about the basic architecture of the API framework. I have been listening to and reading on API best practices published by APIGEE. Although there are one or two things about this guide that I think pidgeon-hole me into certain standards, I agree in most part with a lot of what this e book has to say, I recommend you give it a browse at some point.Building an API for Mokocharlie''s Community photos part 1http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2013-02-25-building-an-api-for-mokocharlies-community-photos-1/
Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2013-02-25-building-an-api-for-mokocharlies-community-photos-1/After a few years of Mokocharlie creating communities around images, it has become necessary to open up this data to partners who want to provide galleries of their own but don&rsquo;t have the time to go out to curate those images themselves.
To this end the most logical path would be to develop an API that leverages the data we already have, I have chosen Laravel for this project. Over the next few weeks I will be blogging about the progress made on this project, from architecture to design decisions etc.A standalone java/jar application from Scala sources using Proguard - Part 1http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2012-02-12-building-a-standalone-javajar-application-from-scala-sources-using-proguard/
Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2012-02-12-building-a-standalone-javajar-application-from-scala-sources-using-proguard/After about an hour of digging around and looking for a way to package a simulation I wrote in Scala for a coleague, I came across this process of doing it. I have reduced it down to a bash script which will be at the bottom of this post but I thought I should go through the steps a bit as the script makes certain assumptions.
The first assumption is that you have the necessary libraries and such to run it they are as follows:MySQL and Scala - Simple selectshttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2011-07-29-mysql-and-scala-simple-selects/
Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2011-07-29-mysql-and-scala-simple-selects/So after about an hour of research and experimenting, I found out how to make Scala work with MySQL without too much hassle, I found a really helpful guide here. Going down the SBT route, I first created a project and all that, then inside of the build folder I created a Scala class that ensured that when I started building, I would have the right dependencies downloaded and ready.Image Manipulation with Zend 1.xhttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-08-15-image-manipulation-with-zend/
Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-08-15-image-manipulation-with-zend/I had been on the prowl for an MVC approach to image manipulation. Especially a method that did it the Zend way. In the forums and documentation for the framework the developers didn&rsquo;t see a real need to implement a &ldquo;Zend_Image&rdquo; class in the libraries as this was already available through the PHP GD and Imagick hooks.
Some of us however did and there are a few tutorials on how to incorporate the PHPThumb library into Zend.Using images in LaTeXhttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2011-04-08-using-images-in-latex/
Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2011-04-08-using-images-in-latex/Note to self and perhaps others who might be wondering why your images are not displaying in your tex document. Despite using the correct syntax:
\begin{figure}[htb] \begin{center} \includegraphics{image.png} \end{center} \caption{Fig 1: image} \label{fig1} \end{figure}
You may find a box with with only the image path being displayed as your image. Please check that you are not using the &ldquo;draft&rdquo; argument at the top of your document when specifying your document class.LyXhttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2011-02-26-lyx/
Sat, 26 Feb 2011 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2011-02-26-lyx/So on recommendations I have installed LyX. I am actually writing this on LyX now. I just thought I should post my thoughts on this programme.
I am not sure why I had not tried this first, it is mainly a WYSISYG editor that outputs LaTeX source or any other LaTeX-like source code for that matter. So you can type documents up as you would in a normal text editor and then not have to worry about all that LaTeX markup that you need to make it look like it should because there are a myriad of buttons you can use for styling.LaTeX Editorshttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2011-02-13-latex-editors/
Sun, 13 Feb 2011 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2011-02-13-latex-editors/I have been looking into LaTeX (pronounced La Tek) editors for my writing now and after a lot of trials and tribulations, I finally settled on LateXila.
Not only does it look identical to my favourite text editor / IDE of all time - gEdit. It supports syntax highlighting, decent support for BibTex referencing. It also has a very user friendly interface and it&rsquo;s also customizable as per any GTK interface in GNOME.A note on Zend Paginationhttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-09-07-a-note-on-zend-pagination/
Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-09-07-a-note-on-zend-pagination/Having gone round in so many circles I finally found out that when useing Zend Pagination and the current route you are using has more than one dynamic variable i.e
$router-&gt;addRoute( 'listingswithpage', new Zend_Controller_Router_Route( '/listing/:type/:page', array('controller' =&gt; 'listing', 'action' =&gt; 'index') ) ); Your pagination view helper gets a bit thrown if you go by the documentation. The first thing you need to do is find a way to specify the first page initially.Mod_Rewrite and Zend Framework 1.10.x and Ubuntuhttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-09-06-mod_rewrite-and-zend-framework-1-10-x-and-ubuntu/
Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-09-06-mod_rewrite-and-zend-framework-1-10-x-and-ubuntu/So all the tutorials on configuring your development server to run Zend Framework successfully say that you need to enable mod_rewrite in apache2 so that .htaccess and Zend_Router* works well.
What they all say is to make sure it&rsquo;s loaded and enabled. I will raise my hand and say it wasn&rsquo;t that easy for me to find because Ubuntu lays out Apache2 a little differently from say Fedora. First of all in the /etc/apache2 folder there are a few folders to take note of.Full Text Indexing with Zend_Search_Lucenehttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-07-30-full-text-indexing-with-zend_search_lucene/
Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-07-30-full-text-indexing-with-zend_search_lucene/To provide a robust search facility for content you have stored on a MySQL database, you may be thinking of using MySQLs builting full text indexing facility. This comes with the MyISAM storage engine and can be slightly limiting especially if you would like to use foreign keys and such. So queries such has the following:
&quot;SELECT *, MATCH (page_content, page_title) AGAINST (:keywords IN BOOLEAN MODE) AS relevance FROM pages WHERE MATCH (page_content, page_title) AGAINST (:keywords2 IN BOOLEAN MODE) ORDER BY relevance DESC&quot;; may not work for you although this may be how you want to go.A question on Zend_Aclshttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-07-28-a-question-on-zend_acls/
Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-07-28-a-question-on-zend_acls/So I have been playing with the Zend_Acl for a while now and I managed to integrate it with this site I am working on.
I am however asking myself a few questions here. What is the best way to implement an ACL, which by the way is an Access Control List. On one hand I can do my &ldquo;isAllowed&rdquo; checks at the controller level, but do I want the user to get that far?Having multiple instances of Zend Navigation in a Single View Zend 1.xhttp://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-07-09-having-multiple-instances-of-zend-navigation-in-a-single-view/
Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:15:42 +0100http://www.mildlyskilled.com/posts/2010-07-09-having-multiple-instances-of-zend-navigation-in-a-single-view/so I have been playing around with the Zend Framework rather extensively over the past few weeks and it has been a very rewarding experience.
I am posting this here because it was a bit difficult finding a work around for the issue I describe below.
Zend Navigation had been giving me a lot of problems especially because I could not get the Navigation object passed to my view object to render two different navigation configs.